craziness: work, class, fellowship due date, etc.
This is a pretty busy week for me. Work is busy because it's Dan's annual week off while Neuron is getting it's big issues that it sends to the Society for Neuroscience conference in October put together, and we also have a Dev. Cell deadline this week too. I also spent a lot of this weekend (I was in Somerville) helping my mother edit and organize her paper she has to hand in this Friday for her Masters class. She had to plan a special teaching project (she chose to start a book club to see if it will affect her students' motivation to read) and do a bunch of research on the topic and get the project launched. Her next class will be on actually gathering and interpreting the results of the project, but this one was mainly just planning it out and writing up the research.
I also have the deadline for a fellowship I'm applying for coming up this Friday too. That deadline really snuck up on me. I think for most of September, I was somehow of the mindset that it was a week earlier than it actually was. It hit me when I was home (as in Somerville) on Thursday night that I had just one week left to get the fellowship application together. I quickly wrote a rough draft of my statementt of purpose and sent reminders out to my three recommendation writers. Friday when I had my half-day in the office I faxed in a rush request for a transcript to Holy Cross. It is now Tuesday, and I have the application form itself completed, feedback on my first draft of the essay and a second draft written, one recommendation here already, and notice that the other two have been mailed. I don't have any word on the transcript situation. I'm nervous because it seems like the mail is slow out here and I'm worried that I won't get the two recommendations and the transcript in time. I'm hoping that by Thursday night I have everything and can package it all up and get it sent in without having to stress about it.
I also have a ton of reading every week for the 16th Century Lit class I'm in. It's a good class, but it's intimidating because I think a lot of the grade is participation based and it's very hard to force myself to speak up. It's also hard to get through lots of the readings because the main anthology we've been using doesn't modernize the spelling, so I'm left with "eche" for "each" and "mete" for "meet" (which, of course, does not mean "to be introduced to" but rather "fitting" :P). I'm kind of used to Renaissance meanings of words (such as "meet" and "happy" and all that) because of all the Shakespeare I've had, but the spelling still throws me off. Tonight I get to read the Defense of Poesy online because my book I ordered has not arrived yet. I started it at lunch... it's not too bad. And it keeps my mind off the fact that I'm still missing two recommendations and a transcript.